Partner Edwine Behre

Queer Places:
11 Charlton St, New York, NY 10014
162 W 54th St, New York, NY 10105
Adamant Music School, 1241 Haggett Rd, Adamant, VT 05640
Doty Cemetery East Montpelier, Washington County, Vermont, USA

Image result for Alice Mary Kimball (1886 - 1982)Alice Mary Kimball (September 30, 1886 - 1982) was a member of the Heterodoxy Club. A journalist and poet, she was the sort of woman contemporary feminists would call "male-identified." She was the child of a strong, responsible mother, Jennie E. Hill (1855–1949), and a poetic, glamorous father, Alphonso D. Kimball (1860–1923), a man in the age-old model of the male radical, with "a poet, passion for the oppressed" and a fiery passion "against injustice in various forms"—as long as the oppression and the injustice lay at a comfortable distance from his own home. Kimball was aware that her mother's energy and labor as a schoolteacher paid for her father's romantic self-indulgence and that her parents' marriage was "incongruous and bitterly unhappy." But she never allowed her adult perceptions of her father's shortcomings and her mother's strength to interfere with her own romantic child's fantasy of Father as the source of beauty, excitement, love, and wisdom. Her own marriage to Harry Godfrey was satisfactory though her husband "does not measure up to the myth—no man could." In her professional work as a reporter she "dogged the footsteps of intellectual men," and her vision of the future included a "very, very great father" who would choose her to confide in.

She was born in Woodbury, Vermont, in 1886. She knew at an early age that she wanted to be a writer, and published her first piece in the local paper, the Hardwick Gazette, at the age of ten.

When she finished her formal education at Johnson Normal School (Johnson, Vermont) in 1905, she began a career as a teacher. After several years of teaching, however, she yearned for something more exciting. In 1910, she began working as a reporter at the Hardwick Gazette. A dramatic murder case launched her journalistic career, and she began a series of moves around the country. In 1914, she landed at the Kansas City Star, where she met and married Harry S. Godfrey (1883–1954) and worked as labor investigator and jourbalist.

Alice Mary was dedicated to civil rights and workers' rights. Her career in journalism was marked by her ability to write vivid and dramatic stories about current events of the day. She was instrumental in organizing a streetcar workers' strike in Kansas City in 1917. Alice Mary was a prolific writer about women's activities around the country. She also wrote in support of peace and civil rights both home and abroad.

A few years later, Kimball and her husband moved to New York City, where she worked as New York City Librarian. Alice Mary Kimball met Edwine Behre in a Greenwich Village cafè in 1918. Thus a friendship was born that would last for sixty years. They were kindred spirits, and they instantly recognized this.

She was sentenced for fifteen days in the Washington District Jail for taking part in a militant suffrage demonstration in Lafayette Square in August 1918. Conditions in the prison were so primitive that the women decided to hunger strike, following the example of the British suffragettes. After five days they were released. In Jailed for Freedom, Doris Stevens describes them "trembling with weakness, some of them with childs and some of them in a high fever, scarcely able even to walk to the ambulance or motor car."

Alice Mary and Harry moved into Edwine's lodgings, and in 1922, the three of them moved together to a house in Greenwich Village. This house, with a studio for Edwine, a book-room for Alice Mary, and room for Harry's photography equipment, would become a magnet for local artists, musicians and intelligentsia.The three of them worked and played together. Their lives were filled with culture and activism, from music and writing and photography, to political protest and social activism. They vacationed together in North Carolina, the Adirondacks, and Vermont, all lovingly documented by Harry's camera. In 1948, still together as a devoted trio, they moved to 162 West 54th Street. Edwine continued to run her studio, working with a loose collaborative of teachers known as "The Modern Piano School," while Harry and Alice Mary continued to write.

In 1929, Kimball published a book of poetry, The Devil is a Woman, to national acclaim. She was horrified by the shocking growth of the Ku Klux Klan, and felt compelled to skewer their biases through her poetry. As a freelance writer, she wrote for The Saturday Evening Post, The Reader's Digest, and a host of other national magazines.

In 1931 she published The Judd family; a story of cleanliness in three centuries, with Mary Alden Hopkins.

The long association between this vibrant, creative, intellectual and talented threesome proved productive and fruitful, and they were about to take the next big step. It would lead them up a dusty dirt road to Adamant, Vermont, to found the Adamant Music School.

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